Support

Your host is using an obsolete version of PHP (5.3). We are aware of this issue. We tracked it down to a bug in PHP 5.3 for Windows regarding the way it handles file handles. Today, right after I finish answering these support requests, I am going to give the green light for releasing version 4.0.3 which works around this PHP 5.3 bug.

Hello Jos,

Internet is a 24 hour economy but humans need something called "rest". We could either hire a bunch of cheap support drones who could do nothing more than perform a support script upon you and have our support ticket system open 24/7 OR we could have the actual developers of the product respond to your support tickets and have our support ticket system closed on weekends. Most companies choose the first option, i.e. give you crap support for a mighty buck. I chose the second option, i.e. give you stellar support for a reasonable price. Since your objective is actually getting your problems solved, not just get the Internet equivalent of tea and sympathy, I think that the option I chose for our support is the one that's best aligned with your real interests. On top of that I wrote abundant, high-quality documentation and made our tickets public by default (lest you need to provide connection details) to help you find an answer fast on your own. In fact, your question and the reply was present in half a dozen tickets from last week.

Now you might wonder why we don't leave support on for the weekend, even though nobody's here to answer those tickets. I used to do that from January 2010 to June 2011. You know what? 90% of the tickets filed on weekends were resolved by the users themselves, reading the documentation. Out of them only 2% bothered to let us know. This led to an increase of the support volume by 30%. We can no longer afford to do that. This extra unnecessary support volume requires one more highly skilled developer to handle, costing an extra $70,000 per year. Sounds a lot? That's cheap for a developer at the level we hire in this company. This would translate to a rather steep increase in the subscriptions price which would frustrate people and lose us a lot of clients. Extrapolating the observations from past price increases this would hover around 30% client loss. Ouch!

Therefore, opening the support on weekends is bad for our business and bad for you. I'd rather deal with the less than 0.5% of users complaining about lack of support on weekends (while acquiring more clients thanks to our very good support quality) than losing 30-40% of our clients due to bad support quality or exorbitant prices. And yes, I know that you probably think I'm a jerk because other companies would like to sugar-coat the pill and give you all sort of fluffy, vanilla excuses instead of handing you the true reasoning behind the support system shut-down on weekends. You know what? I'd rather be honest and upfront with my clients. I want you to be a client because you trust me, the people working in my company and our judgment. I do not want you to be a client because I'm exceedingly good at spitting out convincing lies... um, sorry, I meant to say "exceedingly good at marketing" :)

Nicolas, you are missing an important point: 'staying open with the ticket system' is not implying that you should respond too in the weekend.

As an answer to that I will quote the second paragraph of my previous reply:

Now you might wonder why we don't leave support on for the weekend, even though nobody's here to answer those tickets. I used to do that from January 2010 to June 2011. You know what? 90% of the tickets filed on weekends were resolved by the users themselves, reading the documentation. Out of them only 2% bothered to let us know. This led to an increase of the support volume by 30%. We can no longer afford to do that. This extra unnecessary support volume requires one more highly skilled developer to handle, costing an extra $70,000 per year. Sounds a lot? That's cheap for a developer at the level we hire in this company. This would translate to a rather steep increase in the subscriptions price which would frustrate people and lose us a lot of clients. Extrapolating the observations from past price increases this would hover around 30% client loss. Ouch!

So, no, I am not missing the point. I've been there, done that, got an unnecessary increase in workload with negative return of (time & effort) investment. Remember that I'm sitting on a database of over 21,000 tickets and 116,000 posts. It's very easy to query which tickets were opened on a weekend and when (or whether) they got a reply from the client within the immediately following workweek. It's also easy querying the number of people filing support tickets on weekends vs the number of people filing support tickets on weekdays and extrapolate the impact of closing support on weekends. What might look like a random decision to you is actually backed by hard numbers.

FYI, I had once considered having a rolling schedule of 3 days on / 1 day off or even 3.5 days on / 1 day off. When I crunched the number I saw I'd be affecting four to five times as many people as being open 24/7 on weekdays and shut down the ticket system for 36-40 hours on weekends.

I'm going to close this ticket now.